Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Equally, he has had no difficulty in the past in going into some detail when discussing the Council with the Dáil. Of course, the point is that the Government has no difficulty briefing on matters which it believes might reflect well on it and clams up when any information might be challenging. This is, after all, a Government which had no problem spending much of last year promoting a project while at least one member of the Government already knew it was massively over budget.

According to accounts in a range of European media outlets, direct questions were put to the Taoiseach about Ireland’s policy towards a no-deal scenario and what Ireland was prepared for. The fact that no such information appeared in the Irish media confirms that the Taoiseach and his staff decided not to brief on this. This is the first time in seven years that Ireland was a substantive topic of conversation at a Council and our Government has refused to detail the conversation.

The Taoiseach will remember that his predecessor had no difficulty describing his exchanges with the German Chancellor and French President, and the Taoiseach himself has repeatedly characterised and explained what has been said. Why this matters is that the refusal to share basic information or to allow an informed debate means that the levels of uncertainty here are high and rising all the time. Every day, Members of this House meet business owners desperate to know what they need to do under different scenarios, yet nothing is being clarified.

For the past year the position of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste has been that the North-South Border under a no-deal scenario would be discussed only if it arose, that nothing was being contemplated and that it both threatened a hard border and there would under no circumstances be a hardening of the Border. Yesterday, for the first time the Taoiseach stated that there had been discussions. On Leaders’ Questions he stated “Talks with the Commission have been happening at official level”. An hour later, during Taoiseach’s Questions, he said, “I am sure there have been discussions about what might be done” and that they are “preliminary discussions”. Yet the Taoiseach then went on to make the extraordinary claims that even though there are discussions “there is nothing to share”, and, “there are no papers or documents”. Using his new favourite political attack, he then said it was a conspiracy theory to say that anything was discussed or to question the idea that there could be meetings without papers or documents. This is his equivalent of the Trumpian habit of attacking any inconvenient question as fake news.

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